When Valve brought Portal out in 2007 it revolutionized what one expected from first-person puzzle-based video games. The game offers challenging puzzles to players that are based on physics and reality. Why are we talking about Portal today? Valve will be releasing Portal for Android devices on May 12th for $9.99 on Google Play. It turns out that most of the development work was done by NVIDIA as they wanted to bring big name game titles like Portal and Half-Life 2 out for NVIDIA SHIELD owners..."

After this week having carried out benchmarks showing Intel`s Windows 8.1 OpenGL driver is outperforming their open-source Linux driver but NVIDIA`s driver on Ubuntu Linux is commonly faster than Windows 8.1, the time has come to benchmark several different AMD Radeon graphics cards under Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Windows 8.1 Pro x64 with all available updates and each OS using the latest Catalyst 14.4 driver."

With Ubuntu 14.04 LTS there is improved support for multi-GPU laptops (commonly what`s branded as NVIDIA Optimus configurations) where there is a discrete NVIDIA GPU used for high performance workloads to complement the low-power Intel integrated graphics. Ubuntu 14.04 LTS features better support for these Optimus / DRI PRIME configurations on both the open and closed-source graphics drivers. Here`s the Ubuntu 14.04 multi-GPU experience along with some OpenGL benchmarks and power consumption numbers between the different configurations."

From looking at the results, as long as you are not GPU bound, it seems as though the 337.50 drivers do offer some upside in most of the games tested. *Star Swarm* sees a 25% boost on the GTX 770 and the GTX 780 Ti is closer to 30%, exceeding the up to 21% stated on the release notes. In *BF4* the single card gains were minimal, as were the gains at 5760x1080. However when you run the SLI numbers at 1920x1080 you get an easy 5% to 6% boost. *Metro: Last Light*, much like *BF4*, shows minimal gains at 5760x1080, but shows promise in both the single and SLI testing at 1920x1080, with gains as high as 8%. The greatest performance boost in *Batman: Arkham Origins* bucked the trend of being GPU bound with a pair of GTX 780 Ti in SLI by bringing home a 10% boost in performance. *Far Cry 3* shows gains in almost every test; the largest gains coming from the SLI configurations at 1920x1080 with the GTX 770s delivering a 7% boost and the GTX 780 Tis delivering a 4% boost using the new driver."

DirectX 12 is a much needed improvement to the line. It has been four years since DX11 was released with two minor iterations in that time. We have seen the rise of extreme programmability and parallelism that requires new thinking on the software side in order to harness that type of horsepower. My guess is that DirectX 12 will improve general computing in GPUs and APUs to a great degree as compared to what we have seen with DX11 and DirectCompute. The ball has been rolling for some time, but now that the industry has seen the advances that DX12 brings to the table, I am sure it will lead to some interesting developments on both the hardware and software sides. Good times await enthusiasts of this industry."

With the open-source graphics driver stack found in the forthcoming release of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Mesa 10.1 + Linux 3.13), the performance of the community-developed Radeon Gallium3D driver is now close to that of the official AMD Catalyst driver for recent generations of Radeon graphics cards. In several OpenGL tests the RadeonSI driver can even run 80% the speed of AMD`s official Catalyst Linux driver."

Nouveau, the reverse-engineered open-source NVIDIA Linux graphics driver that`s been in development now for the better part of a decade, is working brilliantly for some NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards while for other NVIDIA GPUs the experience is a sloppy mess. Using the Linux 3.13 kernel and Mesa 10.1-devel Gallium3D driver code installed on top of Ubuntu 13.10, here`s what the experience is like when trying a number of GeForce graphics cards with this latest open-source driver code."

1.html,It has been a long time coming but we take a look at early and initial Mantle performance. The upcoming 14.1 Beta driver will receive many improvements. At the simplest level, Mantle is an Application Programming Interface (API), or a language that game developers can use to write code that creates the beautiful graphics on your screen. In its current iteration, the Mantle API uniquely leverages the hardware in the Graphics Core Next architecture (GCN) of modern AMD Radeon."

On February 1, 2014 AMD released the first public beta of the Catalyst 14.1 drivers as Beta 1.6 with Mantle support. Previously we tested Beta 1.5 drivers, and found it increased the performance of Battlefield 4 by 15.8% on a Sapphire Radeon R7 260X video card. As this is a new build, we wanted to do some additional testing, focusing on how well Mantle works with both video card and processor overclocking. The percent performance increase from DirectX to Mantle varies greatly and depends on the video card that you are using. AMD provided us with a slide that shows performance of four discrete graphics cards on teh AMD A10-7700K processor and the performance gains ranged from just around 6% on the AMD Radeon R9 270X to over 40% on the AMD Radeon R9 290X. We`ve been testing with an AMD Radeon R7 260X due to the affordability of the card and the fact that many gamers are using it since it supports both AMD Mantle and TrueAudio technologies. Read on to find out what happens with overclocking."

AMD has been talking about the potential performance increase that their new Mantle technology is going to provide, we have all seen the numbers that AMD and EA-DICE has been releasing. AMD has finally released CATALYST 14.1 beta drivers, so now we can do our own independent testing to check out performance with and without Mantle enabled. Read on to see what happens to performance!"

AMD has been talking about the potential performance increase that their new Mantle technology is going to provide, we have all seen the numbers that AMD and EA-DICE has been releasing. AMD has finally released CATALYST 14.1 beta drivers, so now we can do our own independent testing to check out performance with and without Mantle enabled. Read on to see what happens to performance!

The potential for Mantle is still there and some of the impressive numbers that AMD is quoting with 40% performance improvements will at least keep me interested until the company can get the project wrapped up with bow on it for consumers. I WANT to believe in what AMD is showing us and I WANT it to succeed because I think PC gaming deserves a chance to showcase its capability and advantages over consoles. It is pretty obvious as this point that AMD should likely have waited a bit longer and worked a bit more with DICE to get Mantle ready."

The Linux 3.13 kernel that will be released in the very near future is very worth the upgrade if you are a RadeonSI user -- in particular, the Radeon HD 7000 series GPUs and newer on the Gallium3D Linux graphics driver -- but other open-source graphics driver users as well may also see nice improvements in the new kernel release. Here`s some benchmarks showing off the gains found with the Linux 3.13 kernel for Radeon HD and R9 graphics cards."

Beginners Guides: Repairing a Cracked / Broken Notebook LCD ScreenOct 02 | Beginners GuidesRating:A broken or cracked LCD screen makes a laptop utterly useless, good thing
PCSTATS can show you how to replace that busted laptop screen with a minimum of fuss and for less money than a service center charges. PCSTATS will be fixing a cracked LCD screen on a Lenovo T530 ThinkPad notebook, the general procedures outlined here work for any notebook though.